


Of Friends, Doors and Atmos Machines

by theinterstellartimetraveller



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: DWFicExchange, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-28
Updated: 2019-07-28
Packaged: 2020-07-23 16:17:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20011210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theinterstellartimetraveller/pseuds/theinterstellartimetraveller
Summary: The Eleventh Doctor and Amy have lost the TARDIS. They search for it, and meet a few old friends along the way.





	Of Friends, Doors and Atmos Machines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MuffinCannibal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinCannibal/gifts).



“Where are we?” Amy asked, grinning hopefully as they wandered out of what seemed to be a small military facility. She squinted around in the bright sunlight, taking in the rows of jeeps and proper-looking cars, parked neatly in rows on the gravel path. _Was that a tank_? 

The Doctor, too, had taken to surveying the vehicles.

“Oh, no.” He groaned, pointing at an _‘ATMOS’_ decal in a window. 

“Atmos? They were all the rage a number of years ago, but then they all vanished overnight. It was rather mysterious.” 

“It wasn’t mysterious,” the Doctor said, turning to look at the identical grey corridors that spread themselves out around them, “the ATMOS devices were releasing some toxic gas. The toxic gas was ignited, set the whole sky aflame. You humans, you block out anything remarkable that happens.”

“So, that’s happening right now? The poison gas and the sky on fire?” 

“We have to get back to the TARDIS.”

“Aren’t we going to stop whatever’s happening here?” 

“Technically, I am,” he said, then paused to look at his sonic screwdriver, “well, not _me_ right now, but another version of me.” 

“Okay,” said Amy, rather uncertainly. Beside her, the Doctor had begun spinning around in probing circles, looking from one corridor to the next. “Would you stop doing that?” When he didn’t, she exasperatedly added, “what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to remember which corridor we used,” he said, “they all look the same.” Amy groaned, grasped him by the arm, and led him towards one of the three corridors. 

“Why don’t men ask for directions?” The Doctor opened his mouth to retort. He was, after all, not technically a human man. Seeing her face, he decided against it, and followed her lead down what seemed to be a labyrinth fit for a Parisian catacomb, albeit one illuminated with white lights and lined with softly rumbling pipes.

“Here it is,” she finally said, leading him around a corner. She stopped short.

It wasn’t there. 

“What-”

“Oh.” The Doctor was frowning. “That’s not good.” 

“The TARDIS should be right here,” she spun to face him, “do you think they took it?” The Doctor shrugged, thinking. Half a minute later, he turned to her. 

“Ground rules,” he said, gripping her by the shoulders, “we keep out of sight, especially from the other me, and try not to change the course of history, alright?” She nodded.

“Stay away from everyone, especially your past self.” 

A loud, peppy voice echoed down the hallway. The Doctor froze, listening to a familiar voice, increasing in volume, enquire ‘ _Really? Who’d you get?_ ’. Amy’s face lit up.

“Is that you?” she asked, “is he cute?” 

“ _Amy_ ,” the Doctor groaned, shoving the fascinated redhead into the small, dark room. They peered out at a passing gaggle of uniformed officers, a tall, thin man with dark, spiky hair conversing pleasantly with a rather stoic-looking older uniformed officer at the front of the group.

“So that’s _you_?” She said, squinting appreciatively at the tall, skinny man in a pinstripe suit. “He’s very skinny.” The Doctor rolled his eyes. “Oh, and that’s the raggedy suit!” 

“That’s me from the past,” he explained. She glanced at his face, illuminated by the streaks of light filtering through the metal grilles, and grinned. 

“So, what’s happened to your eyebrows?”

“ _Oi!_ ”

“ _Shh!_ ”

“Did you just shush me?” He hissed, affronted. Amy flung a finger to her lips, gesturing for him to be quiet. Her other finger gestured out of one of the metal slits in the door. He turned to look. A pair of soldiers with blank expressions were making their way towards the door. _Oh._

They waited, holding their breaths as the sound of the soldiers’ heavy black boots, polished to a shine, came closer, then passed them. 

“That was close,” Amy murmured. The Doctor nodded, getting up. 

“Come on,” he said, cautiously nudging the door open, “let’s go.” They glanced out behind the edge of the door, and stepped out. “All cl-”

“What are you doing here?” a voice said. They yelped, Amy propelling herself into the metal door. It swung back and connected with its bracket with a clang. A woman with red hair in a dark jacket had her arms crossed tightly across her chest, frowning suspiciously at them. The Doctor gaped. 

“We were just in that uh, room over there, uh, just-”

“ _Kissing_.” The Doctor coughed, turning a bright red.

“ _Amy,”_ he muttered urgently. But she plod steadfastly on.

“Yes,” she said, “we were in that room kissing. Because…” Her mouth opened and shut.

“Because we’re a couple.” His eyes darted towards her. She was nodding vigorously. “ _Dating._ We’re dating.” More nodding. “Going out, having tea and biscuits, texting. You know, the things humans-” she elbowed him in the ribs, “I mean, _people_ do.” Amy’s mind raced, the Doctor was clearly floundering. Something wasn’t right.

“Yes, and it’s our anniversary! Well, almost our anniversary, but we decided to get the festivities started a little earlier.” Saying this, she slung an arm around his waist, and pulled him towards her, gazing in a way she hoped was romantic.

“What’s wrong with your face?” the Doctor murmured. 

“Nothing,” she hissed, then turned back to the woman, “who are you, anyway? Are you authorised to be here?” The woman seemed to take full offence at this.

“Authorised? I’m Donna Noble, and I’m here with the Doctor; I’m as authorised as I need to be.” Amy darted a surprised glance at the Doctor. Here? With the Doctor? Was she a friend of his, then? He gave her a small nod.

“Well, uh, Donna, we’ll be going back to work, then. Helping to save the world, from, uh…” The Doctor hadn’t mentioned what the threat to Earth was, had he? “... aliens?” She winced. Of all the things she could’ve said, _aliens_ had to be it. But it seemed to have worked. Donna seemed to consider her answer, squinting at her.

“Well, don’t let me keep you from your snogging fest.” 

And with that, she swept off, no doubt stalking towards the Doctor. Well, _her_ Doctor, at any rate. 

“Charming,” muttered Amy, smiling in an uncomfortably wry way, her features seemingly undecided on what expression they wanted to arrange themselves into. The Doctor didn’t look at her, humming a rather melancholic tune of his creation, as they walked down the facility’s hallway. 

“More than meets the eye, that one.” His voice, tinged with what sounded like sadness, made her start, and she turned to look at him, frowning slightly. And was that guilt lurking behind those greenish eyes? 

“Doctor,” she said softly, in a tone he wasn’t accustomed to, “what happened to her?” To her surprise, tears sprang to his eyes. He blinked them away just as quickly as they had appeared. 

“Nothing that can be fixed.” She didn’t push it. She knew she wasn’t the first. She had gotten lost in the TARDIS one day, and found herself in what seemed to be a hallway of doors with name plaques that looked just like hers. Names like Susan and Sarah and Jack. Dozens of doors of different styles and colours, just sitting placidly along a warmly lit hallway.

The thing that had really struck her as odd hadn’t been the fact that this strange man who she seemed to have run off with had a collection of doors with different names on them; it had been the fact that the doors, with their evolving styles and doorknobs, did not seem to have a speck of dust on them. If she hadn’t known better, she would have thought that the strange rooms that lay behind the doors housed their intended inhabitants. 

The Praeteritum Quarter, he had called it, materialising suddenly at the end of the carpeted corridor just as she had laid a hand on a door marked ‘Rose’, and demanded to know what she’d been doing there. That had been perhaps the first time his almost impossibly sunny demeanour had slipped. 

And anyway, she _couldn’t_ be the first. Hadn’t he mentioned something about being hundreds of years old? She stole a glance at him. No, she definitely wasn’t the first. 

“What’s wrong?” enquired the Doctor, frowning slightly at her gaze. Amy blinked. 

“Nothing.” He flashed her a grin.

“I hope you’re thinking of places we could’ve left the TARDIS, because if we don’t figure it out soon, we could _potentially_...”

“Could potentially what?” 

“Can’t tell you. Spoilers.” 

“You don’t have to tell me. The world is going to explode. Or descend into chaos,” she hissed, “that’s why your past self is here. To stop it.” She paused, thinking about it. “I assume you succeeded.” 

“Well, us being here changes the timeline a tiny bit. And that could be bad, because if we change anything important, we could change the overall result of that tiny escapade.”

“And goodbye Earth.” The Doctor nodded. “But that’s simple, though, isn’t it? You’ve been through this before, we just have to be sure not to change anything of importance.” He cleared his throat, flicking his gaze from her face. Amy groaned. “You don’t remember, do you?” 

“Do you know how many years have passed for me since this happened?” he said, scowling, “You don’t even remember what you had for breakfast yesterday morning.”

“As a matter of fact, I do remember what I had for breakfast yesterday morning,” she retorted, “and that’s because you caused an entire bag of cereal to explode, so I had to have gummy worms and orange juice.” 

“ _And_ you finished all of my gummy worms in the process.” They’d entered what seemed to be a large storeroom, filled with outlandish weapons and gadgetry.

“There it is!” Amy hissed, pointing at the edge of a blue box. She gestured for the Doctor to join her, and they weaved through the pallets, stacked high and wrapped with plastic, to it. The Doctor pulled the TARDIS doors open, and yanked Amy into the blue box with him. 

“Well, at least that’s over,” he said, shutting the door with a click, “I propose that we-” He’d spun around, and stared in dismay at the towers of coral, a metal path leading up to a grungy circular console, decked out in the same coral as the rest of the room. He groaned. Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. Beside him, Amy had let out a short laugh. No doubt, she had already figured out what had happened.

“Oh my god,” she chortled, punching him playfully in the arm, “you’re a _slob!_ ” 

“It’s grunge,” he sighed, “and anyway, it was a phase. I’m over it.” 

“You’re not fooling me, I’ve seen the console room after your Disney movie nights.” 

“Amy,” he said, peering a tad worriedly around the console room, “we still need to find our TARDIS and get out of here.” But Amy had wandered over to the console, studying the buttons and levers intently.

“Can’t you use this TARDIS to find yours?” she said, “sort of like a GPS, or locator thingy?” He’d approached the console too, surveying the console monitors and buttons. 

“Possibly.”

“Possibly?”

“Probably,” he said, fiddling with a few buttons. He grinned. “There we go.” A small blip had appeared on the monitor, and he tapped it triumphantly. “They moved it to this very facility; they probably thought it was my other self’s TARDIS.” 

“Brilliant!” Amy exclaimed, “now let’s get out of here.” They slipped out of the door, and headed for the other end of the stark white room.

“Excuse me!” a voice called. They turned. A man in a military uniform advanced towards them. Amy and the Doctor exchanged nervous glances. 

“Are you from the Doctor’s party?” he added. The Doctor hesitated for a moment, then nodded. “Would you mind taking this to Miss Noble? She seems to have left this behind, and we have to evacuate the premises.” He held out Donna’s jacket. The Doctor took it slowly from him, nodding as he did so. Amy watched him do this. The officer saluted, and hurried off.

“Doctor,” she murmured, “we have to go, I overheard one of them mention that, you - I mean, the other Doctor, was returning with his team.” When he didn’t respond, she touched him lightly on the arm. He looked up at her, startled. “Doctor, we have to go.”

“Yes,” he mused, “yes we do.” 

With that, they slipped into their TARDIS, the Doctor putting it in flight as he passed the console, and wordlessly disappeared down the stairs which led into the rest of the TARDIS. 

She knew where she would find him. The morning after he had gotten her from the Praeteritum Quarter, he’d made her promise not to go down there, and she had. From what she had gathered, the names on the doors had been the names of his friends. Friends who had left him. Friends whose departures had all hurt him in some way. 

Amy made her way down the TARDIS corridors, until she reached the warmly-lit corridor, lined with its dozens of labelled doors. There it was, the only door slightly ajar, with the name _Donna Noble_ neatly engraved on a small piece of metal. She hesitated. Entering a room that didn’t belong to her didn’t feel right. She settled for standing on the threshold, and peered at the door facing her, marked _Dr. Martha Jones_. 

“Doctor,” she called, “are you in there?” The door swung open, and the Doctor emerged, delicately shutting the door behind him with a _click_.

“Amy…”

“I know I promised that I wouldn’t come down here, but…” she cleared her throat, averting her gaze, “but I was worried about you, and-” the Doctor had pulled her into a tight hug, knocking the air and the rest of her sentence out of her. Slowly, she put her arms around him, and returned the hug. 

A witty, albeit slightly snarky comment lingered on the tip of her tongue, but she forced it to remain where it was. Briefly, she wondered if her door, too, would join the ranks of the immaculately maintained doors in the Praeteritum Quarter. Was that what he was afraid of? Her leaving? She could never do that to him. 

And in that moment, there was one thing she knew: no matter what happened, whatever it took, she would stay with him forever. 


End file.
